2023!

We got through probably the hardest year of our lives so far.

Many things happened that made our lives difficult; we're moving soon and we're working on a different project now.

We're also dipping our toes into motion capture – full body, not just facial capture. So working on personal projects became somewhat hard, we rarely have time do it (again – or rather, still).

What Geril is messing around with nowadays is the iPhone app RealityScan, that creates photogrammetry in semi-real time. You basically have to take several photos of your target from all angles, and as you're taking the pictures, you can see the app building the 3D asset in AR. It can use up to 200 pictures – that you have to take inside the app –, and it uploads those to its cloud server. Making a preview can take some time, and you can only export the result into Sketchfab.

We used to upload some of our projects to Sketchfab, so we're familiar with the platform (for whatever reason, we have 4.7k followers). After the Sketchfab export, it's fairly easy to download the mesh and the two textures.

I shot a few (hundred) photos at our family Christmas, so I can share my grandmother's Christmas cookies with everybody. There's also a wooden hawk and a wall that is in a very bad shape.

We hope that we can show you something interesting this year, that we can be more active. Also, we hope that you all had happy holidays and will have a happy New Year!

Animated Game Boy!

Howdy! Geril here.

This month we've made some assets for a scene that will feature our previously re-introduced female character. She'll be playing Donkey Kong on a classic Nintendo Game Boy system, and the console is even animated — so you can check out the gameplay.

For the Game Boy asset, I made a high-res Game Boy in Blender, baked it to low-res and Lussy finished its textures in Substance Painter.

The hard part was the animation.
I recorded a bit of gameplay from the classic Game Boy Donkey Kong game, and then exported its frames as images. Then Lussy put them together into one big texture.
In Blender, I made a plane for every frame and then made them move separately by shape keys.
So every frame is a shape key that moves the appropriate plane up a bit inside the Game Boy, to bring it just under the screen's surface.

And the animation is just that. As time passes, every frame goes up a bit, becomes visible, then goes down. I synced it to the sound of the gameplay, so it matches up.
After testing it on Sketchfab, I even gave it some bones, so now it looks like Mr. Invisible is playing the game.

We liked it, so we ended up publishing it even without the character.

You can check it out here:

Game Boy: Donkey Kong gameplay by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

We'll put together the full scene later. I even made a low-res N64 with a Hori controller for it, and Lussy's in the process of modeling her old childhood CRT TV.

Summer's over already!...

Hey.

We're going through a pretty rough transitional period at the moment. We've had time to do this article for Sketchfab however, so enjoy:

Sketchfab Art Spotlight: Frey Couch Scene Sound

This is related to the Fisheye Placebo fanart lipsync scene we've done. We show off some making of pics in the article, and describe our workflow.

There's also this little test we've cooked up, it's an Unreal 4 Blueprint AI system with very basic pathfinding and a few interactive objects.

The interactive objects work via a point of interest system. First, we created an offset for the head that follows the points of interest that the character is closest to (or that has more influence). After those, we've also added attractors and repellers as child blueprints to the PoI-s. The attractor has a chance to summon nearby characters to itself and make them clap, and the repeller can either explode and kill characters that were caught in the blast, and/or send the rest fleeing and cowering in fear. These are all pretty rough and basic, but functional nonetheless. We spent about a day working on them, they were made as a tech demo.

Oh yeah, and the assets are from the World of Warcraft.

Peace!

3D Yuumei Fanart: Frey Underground!

Hey!

We've had some free time this month, and decided to mix things up a bit. This is completely unrelated to any of our previous stuff - it's a fanart of Yuumei's Underground picture.

[fanart] Frey Underground - Animated by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

The whole thing started when we realized that our portfolio was a little... one-sided. Not everyone likes the OLP stuff and style, but until now, that was the only thing we could showcase as a team. Separately we've worked in many different styles, but together we've mostly worked in one. So we've decided to try out different styles and subjects for practice, experimentation, and for our portfolio. This was also a challenge for us, to see how far we can get in about a week and how efficient we are. We've probably went a little overboard, but oh well.

Frey, the character is fully rigged and has a morph target set for emotions and complete lip-syncing. Basically we've created a game-ready character as fast as we could.

We've planned to include a violin playing and a random goofy animation as well, but exporting into Sketchfab-friendly FBX made our work hard. The process was very tedious and took up almost a whole additional day. (We're now convinced that Blender hates us) We can't include those animations in the same scene we've uploaded, and we thought making a new scene just for that would be overkill. Maybe we'll upload it someday, if people are interested.

We've decided on this particular piece because I [Lussy] am a long time fan of Yuumei and thought that shiny PBR lights would go well with her art style. It was refreshing to work based on someone else's "concept art". Can't wait for Fisheye Placebo to continue!

Here are some WIP pics:

Frey isn't happy with his incomplete hair

Attack of the placeholder normalmaps

Frey's violin in Sketchfab's editor

Some of Frey's test expressions and lip-sync

We love Sketchfab, and it's a shame that it isn't more popular. Whenever we show Sketchfab links or embeds to someone, we have to explain that it isn't a picture or a video, and that the camera can be moved. We always have to either explain the exact controls and settings (for example, this model always loads in SD quality and you have to manually set it to HD) in a wall of text, or leave out the instructions and hope very strongly that people will try clicking on the model. We went with the latter this time.

We hope you liked it! We were trying hard not to butcher the scene. Hope we didn't.

See Lemniscate's ship in 3D!

Hi!

We've uploaded a new model to Sketchfab: now you can see the game's ship in 3D!

OuterLine: Lemniscate - The Ship by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

You can click on the annotations to take a simple tour, but you can also explore it yourself. We recommend using the first person control mode for this, and adjust the walk speed with the mouse wheel, or else you'll fly right through the ship.

This model isn't exactly like the in-game map -  we had to leave most of the props so we could upload it to Sketchfab. We've halved texture sizes, left some out, but it might still be tough for SF's engine to display it in a browser. It's still amazing what this engine can do in a browser window.
The rooms' shapes and sizes were exported directly from UE4 BSPs, so until we release the game, this is the closest you can get to exploring the ship.

In other news, our Greenlight campaign is progressing fairly well, considering we suck at marketing. Seriously. We've visited forums and wrote posts to get more votes, but I guess we're not pushy enough to be successful marketers. Also, there are a lot of people who want to talk to us and who we need to talk to, and it's wearing us both out. We're not very good at social situations either, so instead of feeling tired because of 14-hour days, we feel tired because we had to talk to three people in a single day instead of just one. Oh, the struggle.

Keep the votes flowing!

Ready for Halloween?

We've entered Sketchfab's Halloween contest, and we're working hard on our entry.
Wish us luck! Here are our characters in their glorious Halloween costumes
(these models will be featured in our upcoming 3D comic):

Halloween Eslie Costume by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Halloween Sal costume by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Halloween Cole costume by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Halloween Beat costume by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

September update!

Hi!

In this update, there actually is a lot to say.
Last week I (Lussy) started learning and making blueprints. As we are finished with all characters, Geril is progressing decently with the environment, so with though it would be best if I did Blueprints next to modeling. As a result, our game is finally starting to look/play more like a game - even more so than it did in Unreal 3.

Here is a video in which we demonstrate what we achieved up to now:



I still have a lot to learn about Blueprints, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. If I get more comfortable, we may try to make some tutorials. But for now, here are some of the features I added:

Sliding

Falling from a height

Walljumping

Stopping after sprinting

Some gifs of the test maps:

The sandstorm

 Inside the "house"

 
 Sal cloth test:

Also, we were interviewed by Sketchfab! You can check the article out here.

That's all for today! Look forward to more updates, more game mechanics, and more comics!

***BONUS***

 WTF moments:

After the video...

Finally: The fourth player character!

Hi!

Guess what! We're finished with all of our player characters, at last. Introducing Sal:

Sal by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

He's a stout, and he's the most playful and light-hearted of the characters. He loves collecting things, so he occupies quite a lot of space during their adventures.
Since all of the main characters are done, we are going to get started on building levels, along with making all the animations the characters need for movement. (Geril's doing most of the animations, I (Lussy) am doing the background objects so I can get better at 3D modeling)

We also tried out Sketchfab's new feature: uploading animations! This feature is going to come in handy, because this way, we don't have to make videos to show you guys animations, and you can even rotate the models while watching. A big thanks to all of Sketchfab's staff for making our life easier!

You can view the animation here:

Beat animation test by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

GIF:

The 3rd playable character: Beat!

Hi!

It's been a long time, again. We've been working hard on creating the remaining two player characters. The first one to be completed was the Beatrice, the mouse:

Beat by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

She's not the best fighter, but she's into science and medicine. You've already seen her in a comic, but now she finally has a 3D body, too.

We were experimenting with her hair for quite a while before we got to this point. We mostly used hair meshes until now, so making strands work properly was something new. Unreal 4 helped with that. The other challenge was the tail: it still appears a bit... crooked. It's not broken though! It just needs a lot of bones...
For the skin texture, I tried out Blender's texture paint for the first time, and it made texturing a lot easier. I only did touch-ups in Gimp, when it was almost complete. (By the way, Geril did the 3D model and textures for the clothes, Lussy made the face and body textures, where skin is showing)

(These in-progress pictures were made with Blender's cycles render)

We were working on the two remaining characters simultaneously, so this means you can look forward to seeing the final character really soon! After that, we can hopefully concentrate on game mechanics and level design. I'm especially looking forward to making multiplayer work.


Until then!

3D comic #2!

Hey!

Here is the second 3D comic we made:

Being Superior by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

I think for now we'll stick with these (as they are more convenient to make and we are low on team members), but you can expect more traditional comic strips somewhere in the future.

This comic gives you more information about Cole's character. We were experimenting with sound effects (written, of course), 3D text, camera angles and facial expressions. There are some other things, too - I wonder if you'll be able to find them!

About the project; we're moving forward, slow but steady. I (Lussy) am working on textures, which means the two playable characters that only existed in drawings will soon be ready for animating and then importing into Unreal 4. Geril's doing the comics and other models while I'm messing around with the textures. Alex is still knee-deep in the engine itself (IKs! Yaaaaaaaaay).

Until next time!

3D comics!

Hi!

We spent a lot of time doing a new type of comic on Sketchfab. You have to click through the annotations to read it properly. Like this, in the lower-right corner:

We recommend full screen to see it better.

On non-widescreen (4:3) monitors, you may not be able to see all of the text, because we optimized the comic for widescreen monitors. You can move the camera with the right mouse button to see all the bubbles.

Enjoy!

Stargazing by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

Sketchfab!

Spring already!

We spent the Easter holidays (and the rest of the time, too) working. All of the 4 characters are slowly becoming functional, and we’re discovering more and more possibilities in Unreal 4 (though it already killed one of our laptops…).

Alex is working on a pickup system that is going to be very important in the game, as the players will be switching weapons frequently. We have two functional characters so we can also begin to test the local multiplayer elements soon. (And there will be a video of it.)

About the comic… It’s really late, we know. It’s going slowly because the 4th character’s design is still being worked on. But we joined Sketchfab, so in the meantime you can look at our 3D models in all their glory!

Cole_v25 by carpaintergeril on Sketchfab

Other ones will be uploaded to: https://sketchfab.com/carpaintergeril